Legacy 9-Paris/Ecouen

Parisian Break

Mar 14, '12 11:03 AM for everyone

I seem to be getting back to bad habits of irregular postings…..    My excuse is that I’ve been away a lot, and not all of it for pleasure (a day trip to Manchester to give a ten minute presentation at a work meeting doesn’t really come into that category).   Going to Paris for a long weekend was rather different.

Paris is somewhere I know rather well.   I lived there for over a year during my postgraduate student days doing my doctoral research in history and have rather mixed memories of that experience- I went through two exceptionally hot summers and I was permanently short of money in a city which was genuinely a lot more expensive in relative terms then than it is now.   This didn’t entirely put me off and I’ve come to appreciate the place a lot more in the past thirty-odd years.

My Paris isn’t the tourist city, though there are some overlaps.   It’s much more southern and eastern.  The southern aspect comes from my student days when I was living in the Cite Universitaire on the southern edge of Paris proper.   The great thing about Paris is that it’s a very “walkable” city- you can get from the northern edge to the southern one in maybe two hour’s brisk walking (though it’s much more fun to go slowly, amble off at angles as the mood takes and generally act as that French cultural stereotype “le flaneur”).    During the summer months I got into the habit of walking back from where I happened to be researching during the day- usually the Bibliotheque Nationale near the Opera or the Archives Nationales near the then- very new Pompidou Centre- as a way of avoiding the cramming on the Metro.   I tried to vary my route a bit and ended up in all kinds of slightly run down back corners of the outer arrondissements.   The eastern inflection is a bit more recent.   I stay in a hotel near the Gare du Nord and have taken to exploring the territory to the east of the Canal St Martin.   The area round the canal itself has seen a fair amount of gentrification (factory conversions into lofts, new building developments) and some of the best views over the city are to be found on the heights at the eastern end of Buttes Chaumont (itself a product of 19^th century gentrification- it was the site of the medieval gallows, where Francois Villon probably met his fate, and the municipal rubbish dump until Napoleon III got it converted into a public park).    The territories to the east even of the park are fascinating- a region of almost village like streets, late 19^th/early 20^th century planned developments of Art Nouveau villas and Art Deco churches.   If I ever wanted to live in Paris I imagine I’d choose somewhere in the deeply unfashionable 19^th Arrondissement.

My time in Paris was spent doing a fair amount of “flanerie”.  I also called in on perhaps my favourite Paris museum- the Hotel de Cluny, which houses the Museum of the Middle Ages and was housing a small special exhibition about Gaston Phebus, Count of Foix.   As his name perhaps suggests, he was one of the more flamboyant princes of the late 14^th century (the “Phebus” related to his mane of reddish gold hair and was probably self- adopted; modesty was not his strong point) who built up his power in the Pyrenees by opportunistic switches of side in the Hundred Years War as well as by military power.   He was admired and feared in roughly equal measure, with an uncanny side (he appears to have been almost nocturnal by preference and allegations of black magic and murder hung around him).   He was also an almost obsessive hunter, who wrote an instructional manual on how to hunt every possible variety of game available in medieval western Europe, from bears and boar downwards.   The core of the show was a presentation of several lavishly illuminated manuscripts of the “Livre de Chasse”; a wonderful compendium of illustrations of medieval hunting customs- complete with prey animals (see above for the page dedicated to bears- though I’m not sure European brown bears would in practice have displayed quite the colour variation suggested here) and a fascinating point of entry to medieval society.   Gaston’s book is interesting because he tries to cover everything- not just the indubitably “noble” styles of hunting but the kinds of approach (trapping rabbits or using lures and limed branches to catch birds) which were very clearly typed as “ignoble”- though I wonder how tolerant he was of peasant hunters in his own domains!

Like every major city, Paris keeps changing and there are always new things to see and places to go.   The Palais de la Porte Doree doesn’t quite come into that category as far as the building is concerned since it’s been there since 1931.  Built as the centrepiece of a French Colonial Exhibition in that year it’s a very striking piece of Art Deco architecture and decoration, particularly notable for its external walls being covered in bas relief sculpture (you can get the idea from this photo).  The reliefs, which have a slight echo of the Assyrian palace decorations which are to be found in the British Museum, are dedicated to the glory of the French colonial enterprise and the “Mission Civilisatrice”, full of the attitudes and assumptions of the age they were created.  The frescoes in the interior are very much in the same vein. 

Inevitably the building has become a mild embarrassment (milder in France than it would be in the UK as French cultural elite attitudes to the imperial past are markedly less hand-wringing and craw thumping about the sins of their fathers and grandfathers that those of their British counterparts but nevertheless present).   The upper part of the building went through a series of more or less unconvincing metamorphoses over the years (the basement houses an aquarium which itself dates back to the 1931 exhibition).  The last of these was as a museum of African and Polynesian Art but the collections it housed have now gone into the new Quai Branly Museum of non- European art (even the French aren’t quite politically incorrect enough to call it the Museum of Primitive Art….).  The latest, rather post-modernist, appropriation of the space is as the home of a museum dedicated to immigration into France.   I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  A British museum on this topic (fascinating and important though it is) would, I suspect, be so stiflingly politically correct that it would be monumentally boring and so contentious that even visiting it would be a political statement.   Mercifully the French have avoided the worst dangers; it’s a genuinely interesting and informative place which doesn’t gloss over the more awkward parts of the past in the French state and French society’s dealings with immigrant groups and doesn’t pretend that this is essentially a phenomenon of the last fifty years or so (though starting the clock in the early 19^th century is also misleading since France has been a destination for immigration at least since émigré Welshmen fought in the French armies of the 1370’s and 80’s if not longer).   I was most intrigued to note that the virulent orange colour of the “permit de sejour” I was issued with in the 1970’s was exactly the same as that used for the so-called “Nansen Passports” created in the 1920’s to give stateless refugees some form of recognised identity documentation- a strange form of long term continuity.

Another nice thing about Paris is that you don’t have to go very far out to find yourself in at least semi-rural surroundings and places which have a genuine feel of small town France.   I finally caught up with the Museum of the Renaissance at Ecouen, about 25 minutes by train out of the Gare du Nord.   I had slightly missed it in the past; the museum didn’t exist when I lived in Paris and its existence had rather passed me by until quite recently.   The museum lives in a chateau-cum-palace (it isn’t at all defensible) built in the 1520’s and 30’s by the Constable of France under Francois I- the delectably named Anne de Montmorency.   “Anne” is his case was definitely a boy’s name and I don’t think he was sending any code messages by adopting it, judging from his portraits which show a great bearded bear of a man.   He was the king’s friend as well as his servant and a genuine art connoisseur in his own right- the sort of man to whom Francois gave a couple of spare Michelangelo statues he’d acquired from a Florentine exile.   Obviously he lived in considerable style and his palace has been well adapted for the museum.   The collections, frankly, are a little miscellaneous with some very fine pieces and some rather routine stuff as well.   The highlight is a massive cycle of tapestries depicting the biblical history of David and Bathsheba in huge detail.  As was the custom, the story is depicted as if it was happening in 16^th century live action; David’s army includes heavy cavalry in the very latest armour and thoroughly modern artillery while his court are all dresses in the most recent fashions.  For that reason it’s a wonderful source for clothing styles and fashions in furniture and plate at the time the weaving was done.   Intriguingly, although this is not entirely certain, there are strong reasons to think that the cycle was woven in modern Belgium for none other than Henry VIII of England.   Given that monarch’s notoriously unsettled matrimonial life, the subject matter seems strangely appropriate (and after a bit one even begins to wonder if King David is actually being depicted with the features of Henry VIII, though I think that’s probably me reading too much into a slight resemblance- see below)- though the commission probably predates Henry’s decision to dump Katherine of Aragon.  However you look at it, it’s a slightly odd choice for the decoration of a royal palace- David may be God’s Anointed but he’s hardly behaving well and the whole story ends tragically with the death of a child for the sins of its parents- and I do wonder what message was being sent when these tapestries were deployed in the royal palaces.

Ecouen itself is pleasant little place (if you blank out the noise from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport- it’s under a flight path) with a church which has more Montmorency family stained glass and a tourist office in another recycled Renaissance building.   A fair percentage of the commune’s ground area is made up of oak woodland; a fragment of the ring of royal hunting forests which used to encircle Paris.   Gaston Phebus would have liked the forest- though he wouldn’t like its conversion into a park.  I suspect a modern edition of the “Livre de Chasse” would include joggers as prey……..